US politicians like to talk about reviving the industrial heartland. Though America remains a substantial producer of manufactured goods, it ceded top rank in the factory sweepstakes to China in 2010, much to the disgruntlement of workers who once looked to assembly lines for stable well-paying jobs.
Both Donald Trump and Joe Biden unveiled multiple policies to encourage — or coerce — US and multinational companies to build American factories and move production to the US. And for a while it worked, at least partly. Between the start of Trump’s first term in January 2017 and October 2024, private spending on manufacturing construction nearly quadrupled. Employment in the sector rose, and then recovered from a drop during the Covid pandemic to peak at 12.9mn in 2023.
But large-scale re-industrialisation is a lot harder than it sounds and the tangible results remain limited. The US imported about $3tn in manufactured goods last year, and manufacturing’s share of American employment currently hovers around 8 per cent, not quite half of where it was in the mid-1980s.